Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Autogenerating the Code for the DOCSIS TLV dissector

["Anand V. Narwani" <anarwani@xxxxxxxxx>]

Folks,
After talking to others regarding this, I think there may be some value in 
coming up with some mechanism to automagically generate the dissector for 
DOCSIS Appendix C Type/Length/Value fields.
One mechanism that was suggested was to use an XML document to describe the 
fields and then generate the code based on that. Another suggestion was to 
read the XML document at runtime.  I prefer the former solution as it 
appears that libxml2 may not exist on all platforms (Someone, please 
correct me if I'm mistaken).
My questions are as follows:
1.  Does this sound like a reasonable solution?  Can anyone provide a 
better one?
2.  Does anyone know if an XML parser is available by default in Perl or 
Python ?  My concern is for users who attempt to build this without Perl or 
Python on their system.  I suppose we could distribute the generated C 
files just like we do for the generated C files for Lex/Yacc.

Thanks in advance,

Anand

--
Anand V. Narwani,  CCIE 3892
Advanced Engineering Services
Cisco Systems, Inc.
Direct/Fax: 919.392.3404
Email: anarwani@xxxxxxxxx

"Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good 
with ketchup"